Fordham Law Professor Deborah Denno, death penalty expert and founding director of Fordham Law’s Neuroscience and Law Center, sheds light on the history of the firing squad in this State article.
Comparing firing squads to hangings, electrocutions, lethal gas and lethal injection, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a dissent in a 2017 Alabama case Arthur v. Dunn, “In addition to being near instant, death by shooting may be comparatively painless.” She cited a 2014 study of U.S. executions to note that 7% of the 1,054 lethal injections conducted between 1900 and 2010 were “botched” but that “none of the 34 executions by firing squad had been.”
Actually, that’s not quite right. But let’s start at the beginning of U.S. firing squad executions, which Fordham University School of Law professor Deborah W. Denno has studied closely.
She says the first documented firing squad execution occurred in Virginia in 1608 and that there had been 30, mostly in California and Louisiana, by 1789. Firing squads and hangings are the oldest methods of U.S. executions, but firing squads have been used only 144 times to date.
The three since 1976 “went as predicted,” Denno said. But that hasn’t always been the case.